


Blood in the Water

by rosemaryfennelcolumbine



Category: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dark Magic, Fueled by anger about fridged women, Ghosts, Human Sacrifice, King Vortigern's A+ Parenting, Other, Pendragon royal family, Prophetic Dreams, The Syrens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 12:42:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28582182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosemaryfennelcolumbine/pseuds/rosemaryfennelcolumbine
Summary: Sometimes I wanted to ask him how he knew my mother was dead if we never found her body, but I could never bring myself to. I would remember the hollowness of his eyes that night and flat, despairing way he’d said she was gone, and the words would wither unsaid on my tongue.Or: in which I watched Legend of the Sword and enjoyed it, but my annoyance at the fridging of the women in Arthur's family led me to write 10,000 words about Princess Catia and what it might be like to be the daughter of a tyrant.
Relationships: Princess Catia & Vortigern, Princess Catia & the Mage
Kudos: 9





	Blood in the Water

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this around the time Legend of the Sword came out and am posting now that I've gotten an AO3 account. This explores Catia's childhood and life as a princess of Camelot, but the plot where it intersects with the movie is pretty much canon-compliant. Happy reading!

We thought we’d won.

That’s what I remember most about that night. We thought we’d won: Mordred was dead, his armies gone with him. Our king had defeated him and lived to tell the tale. It was exactly the way such a story should have ended.

During the battle, I had been hidden deep in the bowels of the castle behind as many locked doors as my father could manage, but I could still hear the roar that started up when my uncle Uther stood on the remains of the shattered bridge and tossed Mordred’s crown into the void. I’d had my head in my mother’s lap as she stroked my hair and whispered that all would be well, that my father and uncle would protect us, but I hadn’t really believed it would be all right until I heard the cheering. The soldiers who’d witnessed it giddily repeat the story over and over again during the celebrations that night until I could picture the scene in my head myself.

For months, we had walked on a knife’s edge, beginning first when the rumors of the army Mordred was raising came to our doorstep. It had gotten worse when they were discovered to be fact. I was too young to really understand what was going on, only that my uncle and father were locked away in the council room at all hours, that more soldiers than ever trained in the castle courtyards, and that my mother grew pale and drawn, her smiles and reassurances forced.

After Mordred was gone, I thought everything would be all right. We would be back to normal. Mother’s smiles would be real and Father would be around more and I could play with Arthur without wondering why all the grown-ups looked so afraid.

After Mordred was gone, my mother said to me, “Catia, it will be all right,” and I believed her.

I went to bed late that night, and so did Arthur. Everyone was so busy celebrating that they didn’t have the heart to make us go to bed. We sat in the hall and listened to everyone laugh and talk in the exaggerated, relieved way that people do when they’ve almost died recently. There were a few uneasy murmurs about Uther’s decision not to persecute any more mages even after what had happened, but they were buried deep under the joy of having survived. I didn’t notice the shadow of jealousy on my father’s face every time someone clapped Uther on the back and congratulated him on his victory, either.

Of course, neither did my mother. How much more different would things have been if we hadn’t been so blind?

Arthur and I were packed off to bed eventually, once the lights were burning low and everyone had toasted to their king’s victory a dozen times. My parents had disappeared by that point, but I was lost in a crowd of strange soldiers who patted me on the head and called me “little lady” and so I didn’t notice. I said goodnight to Arthur and climbed into bed tired but feeling relieved that everything was going to be normal now.

I dreamed strangely that night: I was swimming in an expanse of dark, oily water that seemed to have no end in sight, and the more I swam, the more I was convinced that something evil and hungry waited underneath the waves for me.

I woke to the distant sounds screaming and crying. I stumbled out of bed and towards the door to find out what was going on and where my mother was. I felt dizzy and disoriented after my strange dream, I wanted to find my mother and feel her arms around me, reassuring me that bad dreams could never hurt me.

Outside my door was chaos: bleary-eyed men-at-arms rushed back and forth shouting at each other, servants hovering uselessly around, one of my mother’s ladies-in-waiting leaning against the wall with her head in her hands, weeping. I wasn’t very concerned by that, since Daisy cried a lot, usually over boys, but I wanted to know what was going on. I ran over to her and plucked at her skirt.

“Daisy!” I said. “Daisy, where’s Mama? What’s happening?”

She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and looked down at me. “Oh, Catia!” she said in surprise, her voice sounding slightly waterlogged. “Do you know where your mother is?”

“No,” I said impatiently. “That’s why I just asked you.”

Her face fell, and I could hear the forced cheer in her voice as hoisted me onto her hip and said, “Let’s go find your mama and papa, all right? They’ll tell you what’s going on.” I protested, since I was getting too big to be carried by anyone except my father, but her grip was firm with fear. We set off down the corridor.

We ended up in the great hall. Just hours earlier it had been filled with joyous celebration and light, but now clumps of people huddled together and whispered anxiously. The soldiers had hangs near their swords, eyes darting nervously around the dim hall. It was a thousand times worse than when Mordred had been right outside our walls.

I squirmed until Daisy put me down. She was looking around the room, and I followed her gaze: the throne at the big table where Uncle Uther always sat was empty. So were all the other seats where my family had been during the feast. “Where’s Mama?” I asked again. “And Papa and Uncle Uther and Aunt Igraine and Arthur?”

Daisy knelt next to me so we were almost the same height. She was crying again. “We don’t know, Catia,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

My stomach twisted. People never said they were sorry unless something bad had happened. “What do you mean?”

She ran a hand over my hair. “The king’s guards say that he and the queen left with Arthur a few hours ago. They wouldn’t say where they were going, and they haven’t come back.”

“And Mama?” I whispered. “Papa?”

She shook her head. “Gone as well. No one’s seen them since the feast. It might be nothing, but–” She took a deep breath. “Listen. You are the daughter of kings, Catia, and you must be brave. I don’t want to scare you, but it could be that some of Mordred’s men survived the battle and wish to harm the royal family. You’re safe here, but you need to be very brave until we find your parents and the king and queen.”

I was silent, thinking,  _ But Mama said we would be safe now. She  _ said  _ we would be _ .

Daisy patted me on the head and stood up. We stood there in the nervous crowd for many more minutes, until my feet grew tired and I almost fell asleep standing up. Then the doors of the hall flew open with a  _ boom _ . Heads turned, and Daisy lifted me onto a table so I could see.

My father strode through the doors, disheveled and the bottom of his cloak soaking wet. There was a terrible kind of blank sorrow on his face.

“Catia?” he called. “Catia? Where is my daughter?”

“Here, my lord,” Daisy said, trembling.

My father rushed over to me and scooped me up. He held onto me too tightly, but I didn’t mind; I held onto him just as hard. Everyone else was gone. He was the only familiar thing in this strange world where even our own home wasn’t safe.

At last he set me down. I asked, again, “Where’s Mama?” I was sure that he would have an answer. My father always had an answer. He would tell me that she was fine and everyone else was fine and nothing bad was going to happen and that Daisy was lying. Mordred was gone, so it would be all right.

He looked at me, his eyes dark hollows of despair. “She’s gone, Catia. Elsa’s gone. It’s just you and me now.”

If there was one truth that I knew, or at least that I thought I knew back then, it was that my father did not lie. So if he said my mother was gone, then she was really gone.

It was then, and only then, faced with the enormity of everything that had happened while I slept unaware, that I began to cry.

The explanation that later came out was the one that Daisy had originally told me: soldiers of Mordred’s army who had not died with him had snuck into the castle seeking retribution for their master’s death. The king and queen had fled with Arthur and been cut down as they left, Igraine’s body left on the bridge. Uther, Arthur, and my mother were lost, presumed victims of the soldiers as well. Excalibur, too, was gone.

People doubted the reports for months, even years. After all, there were no bodies to be found except that of Queen Igraine. Rumors flew that Arthur and the king had survived the massacre and were in hiding, but I did not believe them.

I had seen the look on my father’s face when he told me my mother was dead. It was not the look of a man who was lying.

My father had himself crowned, King Vortigern the First, and I Princess Catia, heir to the throne of Camelot. He built a memorial in the crypt, with a sculpture of each of the dead on their tombs. I visited it once or twice, but as I grew older, it made me sick to see how small the statue of Arthur was. I came less and less, and then stopped all together.

Mages were hunted throughout the land for their power, banned by my father after Mordred and all that had come after him. Most supported him–Uther had decided to sue for peace, but Uther had been killed by those very people whom he wanted peace with. 

My father began to build a great tower next to our castle, though for what purpose, I was not sure. I could hear them building long into the night, torches blazing to provide light, and slowly it began to grow higher. I wondered what he would do with it when it was done.

Sometimes I wanted to ask him how he knew my mother was dead if we never found her body, but I could never bring myself to. I would remember the hollowness of his eyes that night and flat, despairing way he’d said she was gone, and the words would wither unsaid on my tongue.

I grew older, the memories of the night the rest of the royal family died slowly fading until I could barely remember them at all. I turned sixteen. The kingdom forgot about their dead prince and their lost sword. Then things began to change.

For nearly as long as I could remember, I had been taught that mages were wicked. The majority of my education on mages went like this: they could not be trusted, they were evil, and we were better off now that my father had hunted them nearly to extinction and outlawed all magic.

It’s odd how one never thinks to doubt something until presented with evidence that it is a lie.

The year I turned sixteen, I started dreaming again about the same endless lake of dark water that I had swum through the night my mother died. Each night as I closed my eyes, I would swim and swim and swim with no land in sight, no stars to guide me, and always the horrible conviction that something lurked in the depths that thirsted for my blood. It started out perhaps once a month, then every few weeks, until I was dreaming it almost every night. I told no one; if my maids noticed my sweat-soaked sheets, they said nothing either.

I couldn’t bear to speak of the dream. On the surface, it sounded silly. I was swimming. There was nothing frightening about that. It was impossible to describe the gut-wrenching terror that gripped me as I swam through those waters. Not to mention I had a paranoid fear that if I spoke of it out loud, it might somehow become more real.

So I dreamed, and so I kept my silence.

One night the dream went on for longer than normal. I bobbed in the dark sea, endlessly swimming towards a destination that I never reached. The water was still and quiet but for my splashing, and I tried not to reach too far down with my feet lest they touch something terrible lurking under the surface.

Then: a touch against my ankle. Something thick and slimy, like seaweed but far larger and stronger. It wrapped around my ankle, continued up towards my knee. Once it had a firm grasp on me, I was yanked down into the darkness.

I jerked awake with a muffled cry, safe in the familiar darkness of my bedchamber. There was an odd heat underneath my hands; I shoved the blankets away with my feet and stared in horror.

Where my hands had gripped the fine linen of my bedclothes, there were ugly black scorch marks with embers still around the edges. I could see the outline of each and every finger on the burned cloth.

I had done this. While I slept, I had burned.

But that was impossible. That was–magic. I wasn’t magic. I couldn’t be. The only power in my family’s bloodline had been that of Excalibur, and that had been something to be wielded, not an innate thing in our blood. Besides, Arthur had been the heir to Excalibur, not I.

I couldn’t think of another explanation besides magic. People didn’t simply burst into flames or whatever I had done without having magic.

I covered my mouth with my still-hot hands to smother a sudden burst of hysterical laughter. My uncle and mother, killed by mages. My father, the one who outlawed and hunted them. And I, a mage.

If the world found out what I was, I would be put to death. I didn’t think there would be exceptions for princesses. Power was power. A mage was a mage. And my father–I couldn’t bear to think of the look on his face if he found out I was the very same sort of creature that had killed almost his entire family.

I had to do something, bury this power so deeply that I would never be able to find it again. But first, I needed to get rid over the evidence.

I tore the sheets off of my bed, stirred the embers of the fire and threw on a log until it burned bright and hot. Then I bundled up the sheets, threw them onto the fire, and watched until they burned to ashes. I curled back up on the bed and tried to go back to sleep, but only stared, dry-eyed, into the blackness of the night.

In the morning, my ladies-in-waiting came in and exclaimed over my bed.

“I got my bleeding in the night,” I said coolly, surprised but pleased at my ability to lie. “The sheets were ruined, so I burned them.”

“You could have summoned one of the servants to help you,” said one girl as she buttoned the back of my dress.

I smiled tightly, sure I could smell smoke in the air. “I didn’t want to cause any trouble. It’s fine.”

A few days later, after the shock had worn off and I resigned myself to carrying the weight of an unwanted secret for quite possibly the rest of my life, I went to the library to find some answers.

I marched up to the young man rearranging dusty history novels and said, “Hello, do you have any spellbooks?”

He almost dropped a heavy tome on the history of Londinium on his toe. I caught it gracefully–far more gracefully than I had asked my question. I would need to be more careful in studying my magic in the future.

I gave him my prettiest smile and tossed my hair. “Oh, surely you don’t think I want them so I could  _ use _ them? That would be illegal! My tutor wants me to read some books of magic to get an idea of what mages were capable of. You know, so I can really understand what kind of monsters my father is saving us from hunting them down.”

“I–I see,” stuttered the librarian, who had probably never been so close to royalty in his entire life. “I’m afraid King Vortigern took most of the books on magic some years back–”

This, I had not been expecting. I frowned. “What for?”

“Oh, to burn them, apparently” the librarian said, and my heart sank. “You see, he decided that we couldn’t let books of magic just lie around, not after Mordred. He used to study magic himself, you know, but realized it was much too dangerous to keep practicing.”

“My father used to study magic?” I asked, perhaps a little too sharply, since the librarian looked at me oddly. My heart was pounding at the implications of this new knowledge.

“Ye-es,” he said slowly, dragging the word out into two syllables. “I thought you knew, being his daughter.”

“I’m sure I did,” I said hastily, edging towards the door. “But, well, magic was outlawed a long time ago, so I rather think I forgot. So, since you haven’t got anything useful, I think I’ll just head out now–”

“I didn’t say that,” interrupted the librarian. “We don’t have any of the real spell books anymore, but we do have history books with mentions of spells and such. Not much specific, but a few things. Would those be good?”

“Yes, that would be,” I said. “Very. Thank you.”

The librarian shrugged. “Nothing wrong with wanting to know a bit more about your history, in my opinion. Everyone acts like mages are a thing of the ancient past, but they’re not, really. Mordred was less than fifteen years ago. Not good to forget your recent history, or you might just end up repeating it.”

Two days later I found a stack of old books outside my door. I hid most of them in various places around the castle that I knew no one ever looked, and got down to some studying. After all, surely the best way to control something was to try and master it.

I tried not to be curious about it. I really, really did. But I couldn’t ignore what I had learned in the library. My father had not always hated magic. He had once  _ studied _ it. My father, the king who had outlawed magic, was the reason that power burned in my veins.

It made me think of him in a new light. The impact of Mordred and the assassinations must have been ever greater than I thought it was, to have made him stop studying magic and start persecuting it.

One night as my father and I ate dinner together, I couldn’t stay quiet any longer. He was so consumed by state duties these days that we would likely not be alone together for weeks, and I couldn’t bear to wait any longer for my answers.

“Father,” I ventured. “Is it true that you used to study magic, before Mordred?”

He froze with a spoonful of soup lifted halfway to his mouth. “Who told you that, Catia?”

I shrugged, trying for nonchalance. “No one in particular. It was just a rumor I heard once. So, is it true?”

He put down the spoon with a  _ clink _ . “Yes,” he said at last. “Yes, I did study it. Back when I was a young, foolish man who didn’t realize what a terrible thing magic could be. My father, your grandfather, sent me to learn it. I even knew Mordred, a little bit. We had the same master.”

“But you don’t do it anymore.”

“Of course not,” he said firmly. “Magic is far too dangerous. It is an abomination masquerading as a blessing.”

My heart sank. He couldn’t know–he couldn’t  _ possibly _ know–but hearing those words out of my father’s mouth was liking hearing him call me, specifically, an abomination. “But being a mage doesn’t make you inherently bad, does it? I mean, there was Mordred, but there was also Merlin.”

“Merlin was a long time ago, Catia,” he said darkly. “There are no mages like him left. There are only monsters. I stopped practicing as soon as I realized that.”

I believed him, fool that I was.

The longer I kept my secret, the easier it was to ignore its weight. The years crept by. It started to feel almost normal, like I’d been stealing candles and paper from closets around the castle for late-night study sessions my entire life.

The more I studied, the more I wondered. Being a mage was an inherent thing, wasn’t it, like having an affinity for swordfighting or fingers that instinctively picked up how to thread a needle? Merely having a quality didn’t make you evil, did it, even as one as strange as accidentally setting things on fire? I was practicing magic more than I ever had in my life (I told myself it was so I could learn to control it, but knew deep down that I was hungry for knowledge of how to use my power) and I didn’t feel evil. I had no desire to kill kings or set the world on fire. Would that come later? Or did magic not shape the user’s mind at all, merely sometimes chose bad vessels?

I read and I read, but found no answers within the pages of any of my books.

It’s odd, how the memories of the dead don’t stay in the past, but haunt every step of your present and future. They’re like ghosts. I’d forced down the memories of my dead family for so many years, knowing that they would all be tainted with that single, horrible moment when I found out they were all gone, but I gradually began to let them rise to the surface.

Whenever I had a problem and no one talk about it with, I would think of my mother and wonder what advice she would have given. I would look at myself in the mirror as my maids dressed me and try to see if she would recognize me, if the woman I had become looked anything like the girl she’d known. If she would have been proud of me.

When I stood on the battlements and watched soldiers drill each other and sparr in the courtyards below, I would think of how my cousin Arthur should have been among them. I tried to think of what he might have looked like if he’d lived, but all I could conjure up was the little boy who had disappeared forever. He had been too young when he died for any hint of the man he could have been to show.

When my father sat on his throne and made a ruling, the sentencing of a criminal accused of practicing magic or an alliance with the barbaric Vikings of the north, I would wonder if my uncle Uther would have made the same decision. Would he have also thought that my magic was an abomination, or would he have clung fast to his beliefs of peace and harmony?

I grew older year after year, the seasons passing one by one, and the ghosts of everyone I had lost doggedly trailed after me. My father grew closed-off and silent, always busy with council meetings or locked away in his private chambers. I practiced my magic with a furious intensity, until I could conjure flames with a snap of my fingers and had memorized every spell in my books.

I read all the histories of magic that I could get my hands on: myths of the forging of Excalibur and the founding of the Pendragon line, of Merlin and the great mages that had come before him, of Mordred and the man he had been before he strove to back himself ruler of the world, of strange monsters lurking in the islands called the Darklands.

There was one tale that I did not pay any mind to when I first read it, dismissing it as only peasant superstition. I found it in a book at the back of the library, the pages crumbling where they weren’t ruined with damp. It spoke of a great power that had lived under a hill in Camelot many hundreds of years ago. It–or  _ they _ , perhaps, for I wasn’t well versed in the pronouns of the language it was written in–would grant you great magic, but only at the price of losing something you loved greatly. Or perhaps it was some _ one _ ; I could not quite tell.

There was an illustration, but it was so faded and covered in rot that all I could make out was what looked like the silhouettes of the heads and torsos of three women, the rest of the details lost to time and rot. The caption of the picture was equally unreadable:  _ S _ -something.

I remember being disappointed when I closed the book. I had hoped for more details on the creation of Excalibur, perhaps even a way to find it again, and instead all I had gotten was an old story for telling around the fire on cold winter nights.

I had no way of knowing how important that one story would be someday, but I still curse myself for closing that book and not giving a second thought about it.

It was years more before anything to do with magic in my family happened. My father was with his council, and I was allowed to sit in for the day, being the future queen. They’d been debating whether or not to send supplies to the north, which was in a drought, when the messenger came.

“I’m very sorry to interrupt,” said the messenger, panting as if he had run all the way from the castle gates to the council hall, “but I believe that Your Majesty would like to know of this information immediately.”

“What is it?” my father asked, an edge to his voice. I would not have liked to be on the receiving end of the look that he pinned the messenger with.

“It’s the river,” said the messenger. “The water’s been dropping low lately because of the drought, and, well, it revealed something we thought we’d never see again. Two fishermen reported it this morning.”

“What did they see?” my father said.

The messenger took a breath. “Excalibur, Your Majesty. They say it’s Excalibur.”

It was true. We took a boat down the river that afternoon to see if the rumors were true. I didn’t recognize the sword, having been far too young when it disappeared to be allowed to hold it, but my father grudgingly admitted that the hilt was the same as the sword his brother had carried.

The hilt, you see, not the rest of the sword, because the messenger had neglected to mention something rather important: the sword was stabbed deep through an oddly-shaped lump of stone.

We tried to get it out. We really did. My father set his foot against the stone, grasped the sword, and gave it a few hard tugs, but it wouldn’t budge. I tried too, but even though I felt an odd tingling in my fingers where I touched it, the sword would not yield to me. Nor to the rest of the guard that had come with us. It was as immovable as the stone around it.

“What are we going to do?” I asked in dismay, looking at this legendary sword that had supposedly been lost forever and was utterly useless now that it had been found.

My father shrugged. “Set up a draft. Make every man in the city give it a try; one of them might be able to move it.”

He didn’t sound terribly happy about someone being able to pull the sword from the stone, but at the time I merely thought he was upset about the fact that it was in a stone, not that it had been discovered in the first place.

In the end, I completely missed it when my cousin reappeared and drew Excalibur from the stone. It had been weeks since Excalibur’s discovery, and no one had been able to move it even an inch despite the constant of men to the river to try. I’d stopped wondering if anyone would be able to, since I assumed that no one would.

I missed all of it, shut away in my rooms at the castle. I didn’t know when Arthur pulled the sword from the stone, or when was brought to the castle, or the fight he started and the strange disappearance. I wasn’t told of any of it until he had already disappeared as quickly as he had come.

My ladies-in-waiting each had a different version of the story to tell: he really was Arthur; he was an imposter; he had used evil magic to pull Excalibur from the stone; he wanted to start a civil war and that was why my father had tried to execute him; he had jumped from the cliffs and been caught in the talons of a huge bird as he fell. None of them seemed to really know what had happened. They all knew how it began–a man dragged in for questioning after getting into a fight with some of our Viking allies had been forced to take a turn at pulling the sword–but the entire story spiraled out of control after that.

I confronted my father as soon as he emerged from seclusion.

“Why didn’t you summon me when you realized what was going on?” I demanded.

My father sat on his throne, implacable as marble, his golden crown gleaming like fire. “There wasn’t time. It all happened too quickly, and I needed to make a choice about how I was going to handle it.”

“He’s my  _ cousin _ . You should have told me when you found out he was alive, much less when you decided to execute him.”

“There wasn’t time,” he repeated, and I recognized the stubbornness in his voice that meant he wasn’t going to change his answer. “Besides, we don’t even know he’s Uther’s heir.”

I barked out a laugh, my hands clenched so tightly into fists that they ached. “Oh, so some Londinium street rat  _ just happens _ to be able to pull the sword from the stone when Uther’s own brother and niece couldn’t? Please tell me you don’t really believe that. If Uther really enchanted Excalibur so that only his heir could use it, then you know as well as I do that he must be Arthur.”

My father was silent, and he had become enough of a stranger to be over the years that I wasn’t sure what the expression on his face meant.

“Catia,” he said quietly, “you know as well as I do that there has not been true peace in this country since Uther’s death.” He always did that–called him  _ Uther _ rather than  _ my brother _ . I’d never worked up the courage to ask if it was his way of trying to distance himself from the pain, or if they’d had a falling-out I didn’t know about. My father continued, “If words get out that a man calling himself Arthur has pulled Excalibur from the stone, then, street rat or no, I’m afraid we will have a civil war on our hands. It would destroy all I have worked so hard to build.”

I clenched my fists so tightly I felt a nail pierce my palm and warm blood drip from the cut. “So you decided to execute him?”

“If it means keeping this country from civil war–if it means keeping you safe–then yes, I would do it. I was prepared to do it. I know you feel some sort of obligation towards this man, even if he is not your cousin, but I would advise you to abandon it and hope that he drowned in the river after he jumped.”

“Do you think he was Arthur? I mean, he reclaimed Excalibur, didn’t he?”

My father looked down at my coldly. “It doesn’t matter, Catia. Civil war is civil war no matter who begins it. And it’s entirely possible that Excalibur was enchanted to be released after so many pulls, or on a certain day. It likely means nothing that he was the one to do it.”

He had a point, but I didn’t want to admit it, so instead I turned on my heel, furious, and left the room.

If only I had seen then what a liar he was then, how power-hungry. If I had pressed him further, doubted him, demanded the truth–maybe, just maybe, things could have been different.

But I loved him. He was the only family I had left in the world. I loved him, and when you love people, you want to believe the best of them. You try to make the best out of the choices they have made, to justify them to yourself, because you don’t want to believe that you have misplaced your love.

I paced across my bedchamber over and over again, unable to stop moving as long as thoughts churned in my head.

All those years mourning my lost cousin, the little boy who had never gotten to be a man, and he might have been alive the entire time. The man who had pulled Excalibur from the stone could have been no one, merely a lucky stranger. I wasn’t in a position to guess: I barely knew anything about the magic of Excalibur, it being a closely guarded secret handed down from wielder to heir, and I hadn’t so much as glimpsed the man who finally drew it from the stone. Maybe he wasn’t Arthur.

But if he  _ was _ …

My cousin might not be dead. One less victim of Mordred’s slaughter so many years ago. For so long, it had been a fact for me that they were dead: my aunt Igraine, cut down by an arrow as she fled; my uncle Uther, killed on the night of his greatest victory and his body never found; my mother, her death equally mysterious but just as final; and Arthur, who had been a child innocent of anything his family had done, yet killed alongside them. I’d been lucky not to join them, alone as I had been that night.

Yet now, staring me in the face, was the slim possibility that he wasn’t gone. It should have been wonderful news, but instead it made me ache with an even greater sorrow than before. My father wasn’t wrong: the brutal transition between one king and the next had been bad enough, but the possibility of a civil war begun by a man who likely wasn’t even Pendragon blood was a thousand times worse.

But still: even my father had admitted that there was a possibility the stranger really was my cousin. He’d just said that it didn’t matter, not outright denied it. If my cousin, the rightful heir to the throne, was really still alive, was it right of us to try and kill him? Then again, would a good man try to start a civil war in the first place?

I was concentrating so hard on my thoughts that the leash I normally kept on my power slipped off. The glass vases full of flowers on my mantlepiece went flying across the room to smash loudly on the floor. Glass shards exploded everywhere. I froze, straining for footsteps or anxious words, but heard nothing. My catastrophe had gone unnoticed.

I felt a dull ache in my nose, and raised a hand to find out that a sluggish trail of blood was trickling from each nostril. It had happened once or twice before, when my power went out of control or I overextended myself, but not for years.

I held a scrap of cloth to my nose until the bleeding stopped, then went to gather up the mess of water and glass and dying flowers littering the ground.

We had a few weeks of peace in which I dared hope that the stranger was dead and there would be no war, and then things began to go downhill.

First came the graffiti in Londinium. It came in various shapes and forms–scratched into the ground with a stick, painted on the wall with thick strokes of paint, drawn on papers strewn throughout the city–but the shape was unmistakable. It was Excalibur, driven hilt-deep into a stone.

Once word got out of the man who had taken Excalibur, once the spark had been ignited among the people, there was no going back. They latched onto the idea of their rightful king, the heir of Uther and Excalibur returning to rule them, and nothing would dissuade them. I would say that it did not hurt that they were more eager for rumors of a man who was supposed to be dead than the living girl who had been raised to be their queen for years, but that would be a lie.

It is not a pretty thing to say, but I will not be like my father. I refuse to lie.

Then came the sabotage. Word trickled in slowly, but began to paint a clear picture. Merchants, all long-time allies of Vortigern Pendragon, were attacked while traveling, abandoned in distant parts of the country and their goods stolen. The thieves and bandits who did so melted away without a trace, their victims unable to provide any good description. There were riots, swiftly put down, but riots all the same. The shipments of stone my father had ordered for the seemingly endless building of his tower were sunk, the stones lost forever at the bottom of the river. This, more than anything else, drew my father into an utter rage where he paced up and down the expanse of his throne room like a caged panther and railed at his guards and councilmen for failing to do their job.

I wanted to ask him what was so important about the tower that the loss of it angered him more than stolen merchant goods, but I didn’t. I had never been very good at asking him questions that I knew he would not like.

“We need to draw them out,” said one of the councilors. My father sat at the head of the table as he listened to the councilors debate. I watched him, chin on my hands: in situations like this, he always seemed to become an entirely different person, with eyes of fire and a steel of spine. “As long as they can continue their hunts and disappear as soon as they’re, we will never catch them. We need to draw them out, or know when they’re next going to strike.

“But how could we do that?” I asked. “We don’t know where they’re hiding or what they’re going to target.”

On and on it went, in endless circles. The only thing anyone agreed on was that we didn’t have enough information to properly act. We weren’t even sure if these attacks were inspired by Arthur and Excalibur–for all we knew, he might even have been behind them.

The only thing we could do was wait, the tension rising each day, and hope that the rebels would make a mistake or do something to reveal themselves to us.

It wasn't a civil war. Not yet. But I thought I could feel the beginning of it on the wind.

Whether the man who had pulled Excalibur from the stone was alive or dead, whether he was my cousin or just a man from Londinium with the same name, whether he was behind these attacks or if it was another group entirely, I knew my father had been right. We couldn’t afford a civil war. I prayed that there wouldn’t be one.

And then, one day, the tension snapped. One evening we were fruitlessly going over reports from Blacklegs and spies that all contained nothing useful, and the next my father was nearly assassinated while visiting Londinium. I waited with bated breath for news as guards chased the would-be assassins through the streets, chewing the inside of my cheek bloody and nearly setting the curtains on fire with my fear.

I’d never felt so useless as that night. This wasn’t like the day Excalibur had been pulled from the stone: I knew what was going on as it happened, and I was helpless. My father could have died if not for his wisdom in hiding, and an innocent man had been killed only because he bore a passing resemblance to the king.

When my father had arrived back at the castle, he was grim-faced and something approaching afraid, flanked by double the amount of Blacklegs as usual. That in itself made me even more frightened, because the only time I had ever seen him look afraid was the night my mother died.

“What happened?” I demanded. “They said someone tried to  _ assassinate _ you? Did you catch them? Was it the rebels? Are you hurt?” The torrent of questions flowing from my lips only stopped when my father raised a hand to stop me.

He said wearily, “I am fine, Catia. We don’t know who is responsible, but the guards are chasing them right now and should catch them shortly. There is no place in Londinium that is safe for them, and the city is under lockdown so no one may leave. I’ll see you at dinner.”

With that, he was gone, disappeared into his study for more of those endless hours that he’d been doing since I was a child.

The news of the escape of the rebels came a few hours later as I sat in one of the receiving rooms with my ladies and tried to concentrate on embroidery. I stabbed my thumb with a needle the moment one of the guards entered the room, and set aside my embroidering hoop before I could do more damage.

“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” said the Blackleg as he knelt before me. He’d taken off his helmet, revealing a man of about thirty with thinning blond hair. “We have failed you.”

My heart sank. “You didn’t find the assassins?”

“No, Your Highness” he admitted. “They fled the scene of the crime as soon as they could, and led us on a chase through the streets. We lost them. Your father has headed out with another contingent of guards in hopes of finding them.”

“My father has done  _ what _ ?” I said sharply. I’d hoped to see him at dinner that night. He was busy so often, and when he wasn’t busy, he was shut away in his study doing mysterious things.

The Blackleg blinked. “I assume you knew, Your Highness.”

“I didn’t,” I said, then tried to take some of the tension out of my voice. “It’s no matter. I’m sure he’ll be back soon enough.”

He wasn’t. I waited up all night long with my ladies-in-waiting in my chambers, but my father didn’t come back, and neither did any of the guards come to tell me that he had. I thought perhaps the would-be assassins had done the job at last, until I realized that the castle would be in much more of an uproar.

I still remembered what it was like the last time a king died in Camelot.

He came back, eventually. A Blackleg came to tell me, saying the king was too busy to see me. That stung, but I didn’t let it show. Maybe he’d found information, or had a lead to follow. It was what I told myself, at least.

I stayed in my room all that day, chewing my fingernails and likely driving my ladies mad, and the next day too.

On the third day after the assassination attempt, he finally came. My ladies and I had been sitting together in worried silence when we heard footsteps on the stairs. I shot to my feet, heart thudding, filled with a sudden, tense fear.

The door clicked open, and I saw that it was my father.

There were dried lines of blood all down his face, as if he hadn’t even bothered to wipe it away. His expression was curiously blank; I could not tell what he was thinking. He wouldn’t respond to my questioning, either, merely dismissing my ladies-in-waiting with a few curt words.

There was  _ blood _ on his face, and I had not seen him in nearly four days, and he wouldn’t tell me what was going on.

Once we were alone, he crushed me in a tight hug. It was the same way he had held me the night my mother died: as if I might disappear if he let me go. I could feel his heartbeat, far too rapid, and hear the rasping of his breath. I wanted to ask him again about what was going on, and if the blood on his face was his or someone else’s, but I let him hold me for another few moments.

His hand moved at his side, near his weapons belt, then toward my back. I felt him take a long, trembling breath, as if steeling himself for some unpleasant task.

It all happened very fast, then.

There was a single point of utter agony in my back, and warm, wet blood soaked the back of my dress. I swayed and began to fall, but my father’s strong arms caught me. I could have sworn that I saw him lower his head towards me and whisper into my ear, “I’m sorry,” but my vision was going black and spotty at that point. 

I  _ felt _ the point of the blade enter my heart, and then it all went black.

I was surprised when I woke up.  _ Why am I still alive? _ That was the first thing I thought.

It had been a dream. That was my second. I had been tired, and worried about my father and the future of the kingdom, and so I had dreamt that horrible dream. My father would  _ never _ harm me, and surely never kill me. Not unless I was in the throes of some nightmare.

I opened my eyes, and saw below me a truly terrible tableau.

My father knelt in the middle of my chambers, cradling me. One hand was on my back, the other, underneath my knees. I was unmistakably dead. My head hung back in a way that it wouldn’t have done when I was alive, my eyes staring at the ceiling but not seeing it at all. Blood from the wound on my back stained the carpet on the floor, but only a few drops.

I was dead, and I was  _ looking _ at my dead self.

It was real. My father had  _ killed _ me, and here I was looking at my corpse. Why he had done it, I did not know. But he had done it all the same.

As for my actual self, the one who was seeing all of this–I appeared to be translucent. I looked the same as always, even wearing the same dress that my dead body wore, but I could see through myself. When I held out my arm, I could see the carpet through it.

I was, as impossible as it seemed, a ghost.

While I had this revelation, my father had struggled to his feet, still carrying my corpse in his arms. No longer blank, he looked agonized. Agonized, and furious, and sorrowful, and determined.

He was also looking straight through me like I wasn’t even there.

“Father?” I said desperately, but he didn’t so much as flinch. “Father!” I tried again, but he just turned towards the door and began to fumble with the handle. There were tears on his face, cutting trails through the dried blood. As I watched, he stepped out into the hall, still hefting the weight of my body.

My ladies would see him, I thought desperately. They were waiting out in the hall, and they would see him and my body. They would realize what he’d done. Wouldn’t they?

I followed him out into the hall, my feet making no sound on the floor and my dress not rustling even the slightest.

The ladies were gathered out there, huddled anxiously together and gazing at the door. As I watched, my father turned towards them and whispered something in a language that I vaguely recognized–one that had been in some of the books of magic that I’d read years ago. The ladies all collapsed bonelessly where they stood, and my father strode onward.

Magic. That  _ had _ to have been magic. There was no other way he could have done it.

My father was a mage. If he was practicing now, if he was casting spells now, then surely he’d never stopped. He was a liar and a hypocrite, condemning people for the same magic that he himself possessed and still used.

In shock, I followed him through the halls of the castle. No one who passed us noticed–me, presumably because I was a ghost, him, because of an incantation he spoke every time he saw a person that made their gaze slide off of him like water on oil.

We went down and down, further down than I’d ever gone into the castle in my entire life, further down than I had hidden with my mother the day Mordred came. I soon found myself on an ancient staircase of rough-hewn, dark stone that spiraled down so far I could barely believe it.

At the bottom of the staircase was a lake.

Chills went through my body at the sight of it, though I was dead. Something about the way the dark water slapped endlessly against the stone shore and the way it just went on and on into the darkness seemed eerily familiar to me.

It looked, I thought, rather like the endless sea that I had dreamed of drowning in for so many years.

My father set my body down tenderly on a rough length of stone, and called out.

The water answered him. It writhed and surged like a storm, and the coils of a monstrous beast rose from the depths. I shuddered harder, remembering the dream that had awakened my powers. Though I’d never seen it, I knew the thing that had pulled me under had looked a great like these coils.

I was expecting the head of a massive, sharp-toothed sea serpent to rear up its head from the depths–after all, in a world where fathers killed daughters and lied to them for years, a sea serpent did not seem to strange–but instead the dripping head of a woman rose up, hair wet and dark as seaweed. Then another, and another, until three half-serpent women swam before my father, eyes fastened greedily upon my corpse.

They talked of things that I, in my confused and shocked state, could not understand. Things about power and love and Excalibur. Things that made me tremble, and my father set his jaw in determination.

I screamed and howled and pounded my fists against the stone as the strange serpent-women took my body and pulled it away from shore in their coils, but they were deaf to me. My father did not hear me.

Of course he didn’t hear me. He’d sacrificed me to this strange power that I didn’t understand. His own daughter. He had killed me with his own hands.

I’d never known before then how quickly love can turn to hate.

I was there for the rest of it, of course, although no one saw me. I was there when my cousin Arthur arrived with Excalibur–because he  _ was _ my cousin, no matter how hard that fact had been denied. I was there when the beast the power had made my father emerged from the shadows. I was there as they fought, two gods locked in combat.

I watched them fight, unable to stop it. I was breathless each time one of them landed a blow, when my newly discovered cousin staggered or fell and when my father finally began to fade.

Hate is a habit, you see. It’s something that you grow into, retracing thoughts and memories each day until hating is easy as breathing, until you’ve forgotten how to do anything but hate. New hate is harder, especially when it grows where love used to be. No matter what my father had done, no matter how demonic he looked as he fought Arthur, I couldn’t quite shake the habit of all those years of loving him. I gasped each time Arthur landed a blow, and then hated myself for doing so.

There is no hate so terrible as one where love used to grow, especially when that hate is new enough that a little love can slip in sometimes.

I was relieved when it was over. I will admit that much. When my father fell, when Arthur whispered his last words, I was relieved. It was over now; I didn’t have to see-saw between love and hate as my father and cousin fought each other.

Fallen, my father did not look like a demon. He only looked like Vortigern Pendragon, the man I had known my entire life.

That only made it worse.

I was there for the aftermath, for the breaking of the alliance with the Vikings and the news that Vortigern was dead and the crowning of Arthur and the forging of the Round Table and the knighting of Arthur’s men.

I didn’t know how to leave. I was so tired, so full of anger, but I didn’t know how to leave.

No one could see me. I stood in front of Arthur’s men and shouted at them, waved a hand in front of the faces of my ladies-in-waiting. Even Arthur, heir to Uther and wielder for Excalibur, couldn’t see me. I was invisible to the entire world.

All I could do was skulk around the castle and rage at a dead man and watch my cousin.

He’d grown into a rough kind of man with a rough Londinium way of speaking, more comfortable sparring than behind a council table. I wondered if he always would have been like this, or if it was growing up in a Londinium brothel, but there was no way to tell.

He’d be a good king, I thought. He hadn’t been raised to the throne like I was, but his heart was in the right place. He wasn’t accustomed to wielding Excalibur–I could see it in the way he flinched every time it did something unexpected–but he’d grow into it.

I was dead, and there was no coming back from it, but at least Camelot had its rightful king.

About a month after I died, I finally met someone I could speak to.

I’d heard people speak of the Mage, usually in whispers, but I didn’t actually meet her until that day.

She stood on the battlements feeding the massive bird of prey in front of her something raw and bloody. I stood there and watched her for a few seconds, fascinated. Besides my father, I’d never so much as seen another magic user, let alone a mage. She didn’t look very old, but looking at her eyes made me understand what people meant when they talked about old souls. She must have seen so many things, learned so much magic, that I could never even dream of. The bird flew off eventually, but she continued to stare away into the distance.

Several minutes passed before she said, without looking at me, “I know you. You’re Arthur’s cousin Catia, aren’t you?” She had a faint accent–Gaulish, maybe?

I jumped a little at that. Since Arthur hadn’t been able to see me even though he wielded Excalibur, I’d assumed that no one at all could.

“Yes,” I said at last, cautiously. “Yes, I am. How did you know?”

“I saw memories of you in Excalibur. You have the same power that the girl in those memories did. The same potential for magic. Besides, only mages can come back as ghosts.”

“Oh.” I blinked. I hadn’t known that, although it made sense when I thought about it.

She leaned against the battlements and tilted her head up to the sun. Her hood slipped back, letting loose a messy brown braid. “I know what happened to you. I am sorry.”

“So you know Vortigern killed me right before he tried to kill Arthur,” I said, bitterness coating my words. “If you know that much, then do you know why he did it? What were the things that took my body?”

“Syrens.” With her accent, the word sounded even odder and more foreign. It sent a shiver down my spine. I repeated the word, letting the syllables roll over my tongue. For all my reading about the dark corners of our world and the creatures that lurked in them, the name didn’t sound familiar, and I admitted as much.

She leaned her arms against the battlements. “Of course you don’t. It is an ugly secret the Pendragons have kept for generations, one that I only know because of my training. They are serpent women who live in the dark.” I remembered the roiling mass of coils and shuddered. “It is said that they will grant you great power, but only in exchange for what you love most in the world.”

I had begun to piece it together a little myself, but it was so much worse to hear it confirmed from the lips of another. There was one thing that I didn’t understand. “I heard–Arthur said that my father killed Uther. How is that possible, if Uther wielded Excalibur? He killed  _ Mordred _ . How could my father ever have defeated him?”

The mage met my eyes. “Your death was not the first time Vortigern sacrificed something to the Syrens in exchange for power, Catia.”

It all clicked into place, the last few pieces of a terrible puzzle. I staggered back in horror. “My–mother,” I said faintly. “He killed her, didn’t he?”

The mage nodded, just once, but that was enough.

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to remember my mother as she had been: alive and breathing, smiling at my father, wearing a beautiful green dress. But all that I could conjure up was an image of my mother with a knife in her heart and betrayal on her face. Had she thought of me in her last moments? Had she been desperate to save me from the monster she suddenly knew my father had been, but despairing in the knowledge that there was nothing she could do, that she was already dying? Had she thought of her husband, who loved her but loved power more? Or had it been too quick for her to think anything at all except confusion over what was happening?

I couldn’t even imagine how terrible it must have been, realizing that the man she had loved and married and had a child with was willing to kill for the power to make himself king. That he was willing to kill  _ her _ .

_ She’s gone, Catia _ . The echo of his words came back to me. No wonder he’d been so certain she was gone, though we had never found her body. Of course he’d been certain, if he’d been the one who killed her. I had thought he looked strange and haunted that night, but of course he had been. He’d just murdered someone he loved for the power to kill his brother.

And once hadn’t been enough. He’d done it again. The cost had been terrible in its steepness, but he had paid it not once, but twice. Such a cycle of blood, over and over again: his wife in order to murder his brother, his daughter to destroy his nephew.

“He killed me,” I said raggedly. “With his own hands, he killed me. I was his  _ daughter _ , and he–and he–” I stopped. The memory of the feeling of that knife driving into my heart was too fresh. “I’m glad he’s dead,” I said with a quiet savageness.

The mage watched me in silence, but the pity on her face spoke clearly enough.

I choked out a bitter laugh. “You know what’s the worst part? It wouldn’t have  _ worked _ if he hadn’t loved me. That makes it  _ worse _ , that he really did love me, more than he loved anyone else in the world, and he was still willing to kill me just for his own gain. I just–” I shook my head. “How the hell does someone manage to make that kind of choice? How do they  _ justify _ it to themselves?”

I fell silent. I had no more words to say; it felt as if I had used up every one of them and would never speak again. What else was there to say? I was a ghost, not a living girl. I was just a remnant, a memory. I was  _ dead _ . That wasn’t going to change any time soon.

“I’m tired,” I said at last. “I’m so  _ tired _ . I don’t want to remember anymore. I just want to forget. To have peace.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay?”

I shook my head. “I’m so  _ tired _ ,” I said again. “It’s like I’m being stretched out, like some part of me knows that I’m not supposed to be here anymore. I’m not going to be a queen. I’m not going to be a mage. Camelot is in good hands, even if Arthur can’t see me. I don’t want to stay anymore.” Some part of me felt ashamed at feeling that way, like I should have been fighting tooth and nail to stay here, but that part was buried under bone-deep weariness.

The pity on her face had been replaced with a warm kind of empathy. “It’s all right, Catia. The dead aren’t meant to linger forever. It’s all right to want to go on.”

Her words released some of the tension in my chest. I whispered, “But I don’t know how to go. I think I’m just … stuck here. Watching. I don’t want to be like this forever.”

“I can help.” She held out her hand, her eyes containing galaxies and multitudes. “Take my hand.”

I hesitated, tired as I was. I had words left to say after all. “Wait. Tell … tell Arthur I’m sorry we never got to speak again. Tell him I mourned him all those years I thought he was dead. Tell him I think he’ll make a good king.”

With her hand still patiently outstretched, the mage asked, “Anything else?”

In a small voice, I said, “Don’t let them forget me? Or my mother? Camelot has already spent too long forgetting under my father’s reign.”

“We will remember,” she promised.

“I’m ready.” I steadied myself, and took her hand. The moment my hand touched her I was fading and falling, the battlements around me turning to peaceful blackness with a promise of something else beyond it. I thought I could hear the sound of my mother’s laughter on the wind, which I had thought I’d forgotten many years ago.

As I took the Mage’s hand and felt myself leaving, I found what I had been looking for since my death and everything that had come after: release.

**Author's Note:**

> It never actually says that Vortigern's daughter has magic like him, nor that mages can return as ghosts, but I thought the concept was interesting. Also, I love the Mage, so obviously I had to include her.


End file.
